tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8243351006478134285.post8586592996386473551..comments2024-03-20T12:34:55.100-05:00Comments on Stonekettle Station: I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymoreJim Wrighthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11259550121437562338noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8243351006478134285.post-90149023656138147532007-09-15T03:01:00.000-05:002007-09-15T03:01:00.000-05:00Heh, Robert's comment makes me think of the Ray Br...Heh, Robert's comment makes me think of the Ray Bradbury book, <I>Fahrenheit 451.</I> It's why I do have such high hopes for Wikinews. I agree they aren't quite there yet, but they have a lot of potential.MWThttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09446603415730525882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8243351006478134285.post-80268795466177089152007-09-14T17:39:00.000-05:002007-09-14T17:39:00.000-05:00At last, someone else noticed it. That the news st...At last, someone else noticed it. That the news stopped being about the news and turned into a mound of pap about the personal lives of celebrities, politicians and accused murderers.<BR/><BR/>I think you're right on when it slid over the cliff. I was seeing some tendencies in the 80s before the OJ trial, but the OJ trial made televised news completely lose credibility where I'm concerned. I now get it occasionally on the Internet and even more often from looking up specific stories if discussed by individuals whom I trust. <BR/><BR/>When anything real happens I will usually find out about it fast enough through the people I know online.<BR/><BR/>I watched 9/11 while it was happening on a British friend's link to BBC news that he posted in chat. I do not currently even use a television set and haven't sampled TV for a year, before that I had cable and enjoyed the Sci Fi channel and Discovery but wasn't that attached to having it. <BR/><BR/>Yet I keep running into people who treat it as if the news somehow, magically, held content. I caught BBC news now and then and every time, kept seeing world stories that did not appear on any of the American news at all -- major things, oh, wars and changing governments and so on. I guess Americans don't need to know what's going on out in the world. Or they might vote against Shrub or something.<BR/><BR/>It's one thing to discuss something in what is essentially a print medium -- put in words, ideas in words do not set up fight-or-flight responses. But as the level of content dropped in televised news, the element of TV Scriptwriting grew and grew.<BR/><BR/>News stories began to be paced exactly like cop dramas in the fiction that followed them. You'd get the same plot structure exactly from opening clues and dramatic presentation of the Horrible Event and then go through all sorts of following investigations and they want a wrap-up at the end of the day or end of the week's plotline with a pat answer and a moral tacked on. I watched a lot of local news and national news follow this format in terms of what was presented when, exactly how they led up to gooshy pictures or revealed details that supported their conclusions... and it got so heavily fictionalized as to be predictable and terrifying. Because "guilty until proven innocent" has been the motto of television news since the OJ trial. <BR/><BR/>During it, I kept shaking my head at it because the man was accused, not convicted, it so looked nasty and obvious, and yet I had to ask myself what it'd be like to be put through that if your wife got killed and you didn't do it. To this day I don't assume I know what actually happened because of all the hype. I don't assume that now about any accused anyone, but the cinematic presentation of all these trials and so on has led to an erosion of the principle of "innocent till proven guilty." You might as well add "at the end of the show" to that statement for all practical purposes, because they will pick up one of those if someone's name is cleared by some proof -- but the reality is "guilty until proven innocent" as the news portrays it.<BR/><BR/>I'm fairly sure that this affects how juries look at the trials they are deciding too, and think of it as a dangerous turn in the culture at large.<BR/><BR/>Robert A. SloanAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8243351006478134285.post-53204958846201998982007-09-10T10:12:00.000-05:002007-09-10T10:12:00.000-05:001984? Yeah, how'd that happen? I warned you all a...1984? Yeah, how'd <I>that</I> happen? I warned you all about this, occasionally my hands are not connected to my brain, like say this morning where I mostly can't feel my left one. The dammed hands sometimes just type what they ssszzzzt....kill the brain, kill the brain....ssszzt want. Thanks, Steve, I'll fix it. <BR/><BR/>I'm a big fan of NPR news. Local news here, KTUU out of Anchorage isn't bad though it can be pretty provincial. National news never shows anything to do with Alaska. Whenever anything of national note takes place, say our esteemed Senior Senior throws a tantrum on the Senate Floor, National News shows stock footage of the pipeline. Even the weather channels doesn't show Alaska weather. We're used to it.Jim Wrighthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11259550121437562338noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8243351006478134285.post-81015935276918600692007-09-10T07:08:00.000-05:002007-09-10T07:08:00.000-05:00::cough::OJ in 1984?::cough::But, yeah, even local...::cough::OJ in 1984?::cough::<BR/><BR/>But, yeah, even local news sucks. On the local news we get the "look, it's a fire, it's burning, it's horrible, it's four states away..." WTF? When I get more national news on the local news, something is wrong. Of course that would mean that stations would actually have to invest in news stories (not all of them are big shockers or corruption scandels) instead of investing in remote vans so the weather guys can travel out to Chardon (considered the snow capital of NE Ohio, although it isn't, but it looks good on camera) to stand in the falling flakes to show us how th emajority of the region is not going to get snow.<BR/><BR/>That's why I'm an NPR and PBS Newshour junkie.<BR/><BR/>And I agree about Christiane Amanpour. They ought to clone that woman.Steve Buchheithttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12999709767641212586noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8243351006478134285.post-42877012545572672462007-09-10T00:44:00.000-05:002007-09-10T00:44:00.000-05:00MWT, I think Wikinews is an interesting experiment...MWT, I think Wikinews is an interesting experimental information construct, as are all wikis. I also think that it is an <I>evolving</I> construct - and very much in the early stages of it's evolution. In other words, the rules that govern the acquisition, validation, correlation and analysis, and finally editorial selection and integrity are not defined well enough to make the Wiki concept reliable at a high enough confidence level, yet. These criteria are not unique to wikis, of course, they are the minimum requirement of <I>any</I> construct that is designed for the accurate and timely processing and dissemination of information. Understand, I am not saying that this in any way invalidates the experiment, or that ultimately the wiki concept will not mature into an an accurate, timely, and validated source of information. <BR/><BR/>One thing that bothers me about public databases like this is that there becomes a number of uncontrollable biases in the system - for example, placing a "post an opinion" option on each story, might drive posters to make the stories maybe a bit more interesting, or more shocking, or more humorous, etc. Without rigid controls, I suspect that wikis will become a strange form of popularity contest. There are already people who determine self worth by the number of wikipedia posts they have made, or the number of wiki posts they have blocked, changed, or deleted. <BR/><BR/>Of course, news organizations suffer from these same problems in various degrees, and always will. Many used to have very rigid editorial controls for just this reason. The point of my rant, was that more and more organizations have just given up on it altogether.Jim Wrighthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11259550121437562338noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8243351006478134285.post-27094377049618150922007-09-09T23:15:00.000-05:002007-09-09T23:15:00.000-05:00What's your opinion on Wikinews?What's your opinion on <A HREF="http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page" REL="nofollow">Wikinews</A>?MWThttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09446603415730525882noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8243351006478134285.post-40012563800454728462007-09-09T13:06:00.000-05:002007-09-09T13:06:00.000-05:00Janiece, I agree with you. And I think Christiane...Janiece, I agree with you. And I think Christiane Amanpour is the last true professional on CNN - lately she's started to get this haunted look in her eyes, I'm thinking that's her self respect talking. I doubt she'll last much longer. <BR/><BR/>I could go on at endless length regarding this subject. I am a news junkie, but I'm a junkie without a fix these days. I can barely stand to watch HLN's gum snapping bimbos yabber on about Britney or Paris' latest social blunder. The less said about the Neocon public relations channel, Fox News, the better. And I really don't know what MSNBC is doing, its like the little bastard brain-damaged CNN wannabe. <BR/><BR/>Guess I'm going to have to go clean.Jim Wrighthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11259550121437562338noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8243351006478134285.post-60395577158727595732007-09-09T12:09:00.000-05:002007-09-09T12:09:00.000-05:00Hear, hear! Being a liberal, I blame the right wi...Hear, hear! <BR/><BR/>Being a liberal, I blame the right wing propaganda machine that gave us Rush Limbaugh and Pat O'Reilly, otherwise known as the "All-Me, All-the-Time Twins." <BR/><BR/>Being intelligent, though, I know it's not a right-wing conspiracy. I think T.V. news channels are competing not with each other, but with on-line news sources. If they can't titillate and scandalize, they may lose their audience to an on-line source that isn't bound by the FCC. A viscous circle, I fear. Sigh.<BR/><BR/>I still like Anderson Cooper and Christiane Amanpour, though. Both of them have made a decent effort to focus on stories that matter, and have been unafraid to name names, regardless of "political" consequences (Cooper in the case of Hurricane Katrina, and Amanpour in the case of AIDs/Terrorists). The fact that I didn't have any clue that Cooper was a Vanderbilt until I saw him and his mother on <EM>Oprah</EM> also speaks to his desire to focus on the story and not on himself. <BR/><BR/>I can live with that.You're an Assholehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02634153185390764524noreply@blogger.com